::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:31:45AM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 February 2002 01:02, you wrote:
> > If you say that plain ol' ASCII is not special ...
> > ... or rather that nothing is special and that the whole system is
> > self-describing
> 
> Difficult to do. Godel's incompleteness thereom and all that. The axioms have 
> to come from somewhere...

Umm, yes.  That's pretty much what I said.

> > You may as well stick with tried-and-tested convention and
> > make plain ol' ASCII special
> 
> Disagreed!
> 
> Why just make ASCII special? Why not start with something a little higher 
> level, like BER?

For the reasons outlined earlier - you need something that is universally
acessible, which ASCII is and BER isn't.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands,
 hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -- H. L. Mencken